[Noisebridge-discuss] hashclash MD5 collisions, and ps3 for Noisebridge

[Andy Isaacson]

Marc Stevens, a co-author with our own David Molnar and Jacob Appelbaum
of last winter's bombshell "MD5 Considered Harmful Today" paper, has
released the code used to generate that MD5 collision.

http://code.google.com/p/hashclash/

The full paper is quite informative:

https://documents.epfl.ch/users/l/le/lenstra/public/papers/lat.pdf

I'd love to get a PS3 running Linux at Noisebridge so that we can
run this ourselves -- and for other interesting research.  The PS3 is
still the most general-purpose FLOPS you can buy for under 300 watts of
power consumption.  (I'm pretty sure a cutting-edge GPU with CUDA beats
PS3 on raw throughput, but that's not as general-purpose as the CELL
platform.)

In particular, it would be really great to implement this recently
published attack:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/259

It looks like a PS3 40GB is available on ebay for around $300, which
seems well within our abilities.  I'm in for $50 and I'll do the
organizing and make the purchase -- is anyone else willing to kick in
dollars?

I'm not a game console expert though -- could somebody who knows this
stuff help me confirm what system we should buy for optimal Linux usage?

Thanks,
-andy